19 Feb 2015 mjg59   » (Master)

It has been 0 days since the last significant security failure. It always will be.

So blah blah Superfish blah blah trivial MITM everything's broken.

Lenovo deserve criticism. The level of incompetence involved here is so staggering that it wouldn't be a gross injustice for the company to go under as a result[1]. But let's not pretend that this is some sort of isolated incident. As an industry, we don't care about user security. We will gladly ship products with known security failings and no plans to update them. We will produce devices that are locked down such that it's impossible for anybody else to fix our failures. We will hide behind vague denials, we will obfuscate the impact of flaws and we will deflect criticisms with announcements of new and shinier products that will make everything better.

It'd be wonderful to say that this is limited to the proprietary software industry. I would love to be able to argue that we respect users more in the free software world. But there are too many cases that demonstrate otherwise, even where we should have the opportunity to prove the benefits of open development. An obvious example is the smartphone market. Hardware vendors will frequently fail to provide timely security updates, and will cease to update devices entirely after a very short period of time. Fortunately there's a huge community of people willing to produce updated firmware. Phone manufacturer is never going to fix the latest OpenSSL flaw? As long as your phone can be unlocked, there's a reasonable chance that there's an updated version on the internet.

But this is let down by a kind of callous disregard for any deeper level of security. Almost every single third-party Android image is either unsigned or signed with the "test keys", a set of keys distributed with the Android source code. These keys are publicly available, and as such anybody can sign anything with them. If you configure your phone to allow you to install these images, anybody with physical access to your phone can replace your operating system. You've gained some level of security at the application level by giving up any real ability to trust your operating system.

This is symptomatic of our entire ecosystem. We're happy to tell people to disable security features in order to install third-party software. We're happy to tell people to download and build source code without providing any meaningful way to verify that it hasn't been tampered with. Install methods for popular utilities often still start "curl | sudo bash". This isn't good enough.

We can laugh at proprietary vendors engaging in dreadful security practices. We can feel smug about giving users the tools to choose their own level of security. But until we're actually making it straightforward for users to choose freedom without giving up security, we're not providing something meaningfully better - we're just providing the same shit sandwich on different bread.

[1] I don't see any way that they will, but it wouldn't upset me

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Syndicated 2015-02-19 19:43:04 from Matthew Garrett

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